Modern technology and Indian culture

Harihar Narayanswamy, ET BureauJul 8, 2009, 05.27am IST

Come cultural and moral policemen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's change outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.

Banning the Bhabi

In the short time that Savita Bhabhi has been adventuring through Indian cyberspace, she's become quite a brand. Given her many charms it was but a matter of time before she drew the attention of the cultural mandarins, for nothing can escape their roving eye. Post a cyber inspection of Savita Bhabhi, these people have decided that the Indian cyberspace is not yet ready for Bhabhi's adventures and have condemned Bhabhi to the dreaded 'ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved' exile. What makes this amusing is that while Savita Bhabhi has been banished for shedding her sari, everyone one else whether it be a foreign Sandra Baby showing off her booty or a desi Chameli lifting her choli can continue to romp on the internet. One does not know the reason for banning the Bhabhi, but presumably it is because the content is seen as too salacious or prurient. In which case one would imagine that thousands of other sites with similar content need to be condemned to the 'ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved' exile as well. So why has that not happened? My guess is that the cultural illuminati , given the countless number of sites not to mention the wide diversity in content, are busy exploring these sites in detail to determine which adventures are agreeable — to that convenient whipping boy — Indian culture. Unlikely that they will ever be able to clean these Aegean Stables even if Hercules himself were to lend a helping hand. In the meanwhile, brand Savita Bhabhi has just become bigger. Young kids, thanks to the dogged effort (of the cultural wise-men ) which has made Bhabhi the cynosure of all eyes, are now showing a keen interest in Bhabhi. And if one knows about the internet and youth, then it should not be long before Bhabhi is extricated from this moral prison using means, of whose existence the ageing mandarins are completely clueless of. To twist an old adage you can't keep a good bhabhi down for long.

Walk on

For years as a teenager I lusted after one. It was sleek (sounds foolish to say that in the day and age of the iPod, but back then it was), your parents could not tell you to turn down the volume, you could carry it wherever you went and you were the envy of your peer group. Few if any of us actually owned the brand — in the socialist India of that day and age, capitalist icons like Sony were a pipe-dream . The guys who owned a Sony (never did an advertising tagline 'It's A Sony' resonate more truly) Walkman were like the chosen ones. The rest just made do with lesser known brands but as far as we were concerned, they were all Walkmen. Like many in my generation, I never owned one (so much for those who pretend those were the good old days) till I started working. The closest one came to it was friends who had relatives abroad and therefore got one as a gift. It was a thrill to be able to take that clunky box, slip in your favourite Springsteen, Deep Purple, Scorpions or Madonna (cringe as we might today but Material Girl was big) cassette, attach it to your belt, plug in hissy (compared to what you get today ) headphones and then strut the street/house/college canteen or wherever you were. You played a song and if you wanted to listen to it again you flipped the cassette and forwarded it (the cheap versions had no rewind facility) till 'the spot' flipped it again and then played it again. And then there were the guys who managed to buy cheap amps, second hand speakers and voila you had yourself a music system. It's hard to imagine that a gadget with so many flaws — clunky, routinely chewing up tapes, heavy enough to make the belt holder a pointless innovation — was the biggest teen brand of its time. Sony may have been able to stop rivals from using the brand name, but to consumers no matter who made the box they owned a Walkman.